Hanni El Khatib—FLIGHT

Hanni El Khatib’s FLIGHT is ostensibly a dance album. It’s driven throughout by beats which recall the best of classic Detroit techno (one track’s title even doffs a cap to the city). But, at the same time, it’s oddly compressed and murky, with bass that trades clarity for lo-fi fogginess. This style is by no means bad—there’s intentionality to it. In the spirit of Liars’ Mess and T.F.C.F., this album has no floor—so the listening experience is frantic and anxiety-inducing, like struggling to stand up in the deep end of a pool.

Once acclimated to this production, you’ll be able to pick out little cracks of brightness, like the piano solo in pop banger ‘ALIVE’, or the tight snares that punctuate ‘STRESSY’. Such moments of hope enliven and enrich the album’s more fraught sections—and when FLIGHT opens out like this, it’s really gratifying to hear.

The anxiety is deepened by the album’s inability to settle—at just over half an hour, it manages to jam in over a dozen compositions, whose tones all veer wildly apart. The effect is a colourful collage of ideas that don’t really try to coalesce. This album doesn’t have one unifying statement of intent—it has about ten contradictory ones—but they all provide a thrill.   

A real standout is ‘LEADER’, which works its theme into its composition with a call-and-response that sounds like Fear of Music-era Talking Heads. In fact, while they may not appear to share much DNA on the surface, Hanni El Khatib and David Byrne both reflect fairly similar aspects of the world in their work. Everything’s a coiled spring—tightly-wound and quietly aggressive. You feel, with FLIGHT, on the precipice of something that’s out of control; you’re at a party which is about to erupt into violence; watching a trapeze artist hang in the air, certain they’re about to fatll. But you know you’re going to watch, mesmerised, no matter how ugly things get.

FLIGHT is available for pre-order and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Yaeji—WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던

Yaeji seemed to appear fully-formed, with no knock and no doorbell, as one of the most charismatic vocalists and producers working. Her instantly recognisable style—which reframes New York as an incorporeal and impossibly chilled place—now welcomes a full-length mixtape, WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던, to its canon.

WHAT WE DREW… carries over the melancholic humour of Yaeji’s previous releases. Lead single ‘WAKING UP DOWN’ is catchy enough that its lyrical strength is easy to overlook. Beneath the track’s propulsive veneer, the comic defeatism of Morrissey scatters the ground—heightening both the absurdity and need of dancing through your pain. And, unlike Morrissey, Yaeji seems like someone who’d be a blast to hang out with.

Perhaps this is part of the problem. Coasting on her irresistible appeal, Yaeji’s vocals are one of the few elements which don’t feel like they’ve been tweaked in the three years since EP2. Some multi-track layering and reverb on the mixtape’s title track add a fresh feeling of dreaminess—but these effects are de-emphasised, even lost, in the mix. It feels as though the producer is struggling to step from the shadow of her acclaim; innovations and fresh takes hidden behind the safe and familiar.

Some collaborations try to break the spell too—but their quality is inconsistent and at worst dire. ‘FREE INTERLUDE’ is freestyled to a fault. Lil Fayo, trenchcoat, and Sweet Pea prove it’s difficult to do “that Yaeji thing”, contributing lyrics which are neither as charming nor witty as anyone wanted them to be (except maybe “a cheech has a sturple”). The result is studio outtake material which recalls the worst of classic hip-hop skits—and, more criminally, is a waste of a great beat.

Maybe this is a limitation of the form; you can’t release a mixtape without a few collaborations. But these collaborations subtract from WHAT WE DREW… more often than they add.

These problems wouldn’t be felt as keenly without the radical changes Yaeji makes to her instrumentation. Synthesisers have a new brightness and wonderful analogue feeling; intimate and crystalline, where previously they’d have been distant and murky. Compositions are driven by chords and melodies as often as they are by beats. And sometimes, as in the breaks of ‘IN THE MIRROR 거울’, even these beats are revised, revolutionised, searching new territories.  

WHAT WE DREW… has, then, one foot in the future, another stuck in the mire of the past. And you can forgive this of a mixtape—its “unofficial” status (on a major label nonetheless) meant to signify the project as throwaway, thrown-together, messy and transitional. It’s just a shame it took three years to arrive.

WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Benjamin Finger—Less One Knows

Less One Knows, the latest album from Norwegian composer Benjamin Finger, is an anthill. It’s subdued, humbly tucked into cracks in the patio; solid, impossibly intricate, and huge from the inside. But it’s also delicate enough you feel you could put your foot right through it. Stripped-down and intimate, this album commands attention precisely because it does not ask. Think Godspeed side-project Thee Silver Mt. Zion and you’re halfway there. But Less One Knows dodges Efrim & co.’s pomp for something far smaller in scale; an icky, paranoid chamber piece riddled with delays and sustained atonal squawks.

‘Open Phase’ is a stark opening which sits on the brink between melody and noise. The track constantly threatens to succumb to itself and feedback indefinitely, but never quite reaches that terminus. Instead it stretches the tension out through several minutes. The tone which backbones the track is reminiscent of the opening of Bowie’s Station to Station; a primer for the oddity and discomfort which will follow.

The same technique is deployed at various times throughout Less One Knows. We transition between ‘Head Fading Blues’ and ‘Worried Sick of Echo’ with elongated, piercing tones as our guide. Like with the iconic one-note solo of Talk Talk’s ‘After the Flood’, we think we’re hanging in stasis—but we’re really shifting gears abruptly between warring anxieties. The transition between these two tracks marks the first of several times on Less One Knows that we are forced to reprogram and re-orient through a feverish, depressive soundscape.

‘Bothered Earwaves’ is a similarly foreboding instrumental; screaming in rhythmic ire like a siren—the collective breaths of a wasps’ nest.

The tension of Less One Knows does occasionally submit to warmth—a switch signalled by the appearance of Finger’s vocals. The album’s title track is the first instance of these; fretful, desolate, brief and near-inaudible—crushed by instruments soon after they appear. The last is ‘Once Upon a Dirty Sound’: a song which is half-shoegaze, half-Jandek. A dissonant piece of blues improv, the track is at once this album’s loneliest and most welcoming piece.

On ‘Crushed At Sea’, vocals are performed much more confidently, and bloom into Clear Moon-era Phil Elverum confessionals. The track is almost like a mission statement for Less One Knows. Lyrics are at first buried beneath a wash of hopelessness. After growing more naked and audible as the track progresses, they appear most clearly with its final lyric: “…vanish”. The sound of a human voice feels like cresting out of a dark, wide sea after struggling to the surface. Then, it’s gone.

Less One Knows is available for pre-order and streaming here. Releasing April 17th.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Mentrix—My Enemy, My Love

“Fusion” is a word as broad and unhelpful as any other genre categorisation. Potentially a stone’s throw from new age, reiki and psytrance, it’s burdened with ten thousand lame associations. So, when “fuses eastern and western sounds” appears on a press release, you can imagine the wave of hesitation. What exactly am I getting here?

My Enemy, My Love, from Iranian artist Mentrix (Samar Rad) is, ostensibly, a fusion album. But rather than diminish the intent of its traditional influences, it rearranges gracefully for our cold and inorganic present. Rad has not sought to make some self-conscious cross-cultural collage: she is, like all of us, living in a newly global world. The term “fusion” belongs in the 1970s, when there was still novelty to catching a flight and global cultures were further than a google away. Nowadays, if we aren’t fusing, we haven’t been listening.

That said, the skeleton of My Enemy, My Love is a traditional Sufi one. Daf drums are built on a large empty frame which, for Rad, has philosophical ramifications unto itself. “When you are truly empty of the world,” she says, “the entire universe can resonate within you.” On this LP, the drums pulse with an unstoppable power and circular, trance-like repetition. Nowhere is this truer than on midpoint track ‘Longing’ where, like the pummelling of revival trilogy Swans, you could just as well be listening to the world’s heartbeat.

These drums are post-processed and surrounded by nasty-fied textures—think the clanging of bedsprings and acidic hiss of The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual—which position the LP as less of a fusion and more a corruption. Through this edgy production, Rad upholds the exultance of her influences. My Enemy, My Love isn’t crushing or depressive. It’s just got a few hundred volts going through it. A fair parallel would be the supercharged Tune-Yards; a little fried, a little freakish, but beautiful and bouncing all the same. Some significant control has been exercised to ensure My Enemy, My Love didn’t get lost in concept, or have the sincerity produced out of it.

When restraint is abandoned, the LP becomes thrilling in a different way. On the title track—a stunner in perpetual acceleration—rhythms jabber in swirls of chaos before building to a cacophonous drone. The track overstimulates to the point of causing a shutdown; all you can do is listen in awe. Signifiers of meaning are set aside for a pure experiential ride. It’s in these hyper-symbolic spaces that My Enemy, My Love really excels; the areas of ourselves which, no matter where in the world we’re from, wait in blind apprehension for our touch.

 My Enemy, My Love is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Baxter Dury—The Night Chancers

In the recently-released video for Baxter Dury’s ‘I’m Not Your Dog’—the song which opens The Night Chancers—Dury staggers across a deserted beach, weak and bleeding at the end of some vicious pursuit. Dury’s detractors would say he was hounded by the legacy of his father Ian. For some, Baxter still labours under that long shadow—styled to the nines to hide a deep abdominal rupture; a weakness, or literal lack of guts.

In fact, Baxter isn’t hiding anything. The Night Chancers is peppered throughout with wilful self-denigration, dismantling its own geezerish image in real-time. The album’s title track alternates recordings of a dog’s powerful bark and pathetic whimper. The Night Chancers is powerful precisely because it is wounded; naked.

There’s even space for queerness. ‘Samurai’ is a sexually-charged song with a potluck of pipe-climbing, sword-swinging imagery. The object of desire isn’t a damsel—it’s a fierce warrior. Again, Ian got there first (with ‘Superman’s Big Sister’—a kind of cuck-y, submissive fantasy which trembles at the power of the woman it’s describing). But this kind of thing didn’t start or end with Ian—it’s always been endemic in disco and funk, like it or not.

The path cleft by Baxter—droll spoken-word bouncing on minimalistic grooves—is close to Ian’s, albeit only superficially. It tells you something that ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ is compared just as often to Serge Gainsbourg or the Pet Shop Boys. And sure, Baxter inhabits different characters and personas across this LP, too; another fundament of his father’s work. ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ tells us, “I’m not your fucking friend,” before ‘Saliva Hog’ addresses us as “friend” about fifty times a couple of tracks later. But these perspectives and pieces are glued together by Baxter’s—not Ian’s style. A style all to its own. And that’s more than enough. Underneath our suits and shirts and skin everyone is the same bright red—it’s how we wear ourselves that defines us.

The Night Chancers is available for purchase here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe